Back before HR became strategic and was merely useful, there were these magical creatures called Recruiters. They would lead the hiring manager through the critical process of writing the job description, posting it in just the right places to attract just the right candidates and then screening the candidates until there was a list of maybe ten. Hiring mangers would narrow this to three or five finalists and, with the help of the Recruiter, interview, test, check, interview again and check one more time before negotiating the offer that would land the ideal employee. Well that’s all disappeared into a puff of something called Talent Management.
These days recruiters cut and paste a job description they don’t understand into a web page they don’t choose and mostly call it a day. Systems outsourced to the same people who design scratch-off lottery tickets are then invoked to capture, manage and rank the applications and present them to the hiring manager in a seamless, efficient manner. Which from the hiring manager’s point-of-view looks a lot more like a steaming pile of potential just landed on their desk and there’s not a shovel in sight.
That’s why my friend Theresa did not have a nice Christmas. She is a hiring manager and instead of a box of candy and a nice bonus, she brought home a stack of resumes for the holidays. They’ve been vetted, of course, by the advanced software that takes vengeful pride in its ability to find keywords that not only don’t match the job description, but also push the least qualified people to the top of the heap.
So the important task of hiring a junior marketing manager for a pharmaceutical company has become a game of Frogger in which Theresa must navigate from one ditch to another while hoping not to be squished by Indifference, run over by Incompetence and side-swiped by Impatience. Let’s see what the resumes have brought in.
The Sprayers:
Like a sprinkler head on a golf course, these people just pop up every so often and hose the world with their resumes. They do things like work at Starbucks, attack shoppers with perfume at the mall or sell windows on the phone. They don’t respond to job boards, they vandalize them.
The Prayers:
These are the people who have read too many career books and too few text books. Ambitious, well-meaning and absolutely unqualified, they nevertheless spend their days applying for things that sound like they might be fun. Concert pianist, fairy princess, marketing manager, oral surgeon, doesn’t matter. They’d be darn good at it if you’d just give them a chance. Their resumes have all the right keywords and none of the right anything else. Sometimes they call you. They are a restraining order waiting to happen.
The Fallen:
These are the saddest applications. People who did everything right, got a good education, a series of great jobs, excellent experience and then jumped, fell or were pushed off some headquarters building somewhere and have wandered the parking lots of corporate Canada ever since. They are way over qualified. They deserve more than we can possibly pay them. And they were doing this job twenty years ago. Theresa will probably interview a few of them. But she likely won’t hire them.
The Close-but-no-cigar Crew:
These are people who come very close in terms of skill and experience and still manage to blow it before the interview. The lady who put this line under key strengths: “very detial (sic) oriented” comes to mind. Or the woman who felt it necessary to explain why she left each of her previous employers (even when it wasn’t exactly voluntary). One guy listed future member of the Mile-High Club under objectives.
The Good Ones:
Somewhere in there are resumes from qualified people with the skills and experience required. But they sure do a good job of hiding that fact. Their resumes are three pages longer than they need to be but manage not to present a whole person with an education and experience and outside interests. They are a tag cloud of the meaningless drool they think we want to hear but that really impresses only the software. Profiles like this one:
Marketing executive (graduated three years ago) has experience with multiple personal care modalities (worked at Lush) and branding strategy (ordered pens for his hockey team), forecasting and analyzing performance against target (uses Excel to manage a fantasy football league) and outstanding leadership (see football) capabilities combined with international experience (went to Florida last spring).
So out of more than 120 applicants, about 20 actually had relevant experience. But the Frogger game requires just five be chosen. To the cover letter! This should help weed out the people with poor or non-existent communication skills. Right? Well you’d think so but it mostly reduced the entire pool to about three. Some of the letters referred to other job postings in other companies (who doesn’t change that bit?) Some were so poorly written it was hard to tell what, if any, point was being made. Almost all had significant spelling and grammar errors. A few were verging on rude and at least one read like a break-up letter to his last boss.
Theresa is still looking but she got new bath salts for Christmas.
Related Posts
Marketing Recruitment is Broken Part One: Bethany’s Revenge
Theresa’s Chilly Winter
BizMarketer is written by Elizabeth Williams
I help companies have better conversations
Drop me a line at ewilliams@candlerchase.com
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Jane Oldaker says
Bizzy – Would just like to comment that this was a very entertaining view from someone watching the person on the other side of the fence! Of course, propositioning with one’s resume is a marketing exercise. Of course propositioning itself is a marketing exercise. As long as I’m getting carried away where can I apply for a Fairy Princess position? I hope you will follow up with How Teresa Narrowed it Down to Five Once Her Christmas Bath Salts Were Gone. I will await…
Bizmarketer says
Hi Jane,
We’re all topped on Fairy Princesses at my office just now, but Disney may have an opening and it’s tax season. I will see how Theresa makes out when she gets out of rehab. Ugly mix up with the bath salts…